Sunshine (2007)

	Directed by: Danny Boyle	COUNTRY UK GENRE Science Fiction/ Thriller/Horror NORWEGIAN TITLE Sunshine RUNNING TIME 107 minutes
	Produced by: Andrew Macdonald
	Written by: Alex Garland

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Cassie	Rose Byrne
Searle	Cliff Curtis	½
Mace	Chris Evans	½
Harvey	Troy Garity
Capa	Cillian Murphy	½
Kaneda	Hiroyuki Sanada
Pinbacker	Mark Strong
Trey	Benedict Wong
Corazon	Michelle Yeoh

Review

Coming from a tradition of serious science fiction, fathered by 2001, and owing a lot to Brian De Palma's masterpiece Mission to Mars, Sunshine manages to create a universe of its own, deploying elements of different genres to make up a suspenseful and visionary film.

The director is Danny Boyle, one of the few contemporary filmmakers who truly deserve to be dubbed an auteur. Preoccupied with thematic depth and breaking new ground, Boyle is a director from whom one can expect ambitious projects. In Sunshine, he's able to create a seductively arcane atmosphere that sucks you in and doesn't offer you a way out until the almost flawless script submerges into a bit too familiar horror territory towards the end. Note, however, that with "flawless", I am not talking about the technical aspects of the 'science' part in science fiction. Like Mission to Mars, Sunshine justifies its premise expertly, evading claims for a watertight scientific logic by working out a watertight narrative logic. Another clever move by Boyle here is to jump into the mission in medias res, presenting the backdrop to the story as the film progresses. This, along with screenwriter Alex Garland's fine characterizations and immaculate attention to detail, gives the film a realistic foundation from which to build its more fantastical continuum.

Boyle's greatest feat with Sunshine ultimately isn't the macro-level themes, but rather his aesthetic achievement. Few are better at conveying their narrative through compositions and camera antics, and there are a few remarkable such segments here. Many of these are projected through Cillian Murphy, who fortifies his position as one of the most exciting prospects around. He acts more with his face than most performers, at times more through postures than expressions, and there's a constant duality to his appearance that comes off as appropriately alluring in a film such as this one.

It would be accusatory to claim that Sunshine steals from Mission to Mars, but there are a number of crucial scenes that owe a lot of their effect to De Palma's film (notably Murphy/Sanada's mission to fix the panels). As long as it works as well as it does here, I have no complaints. That is, until Garland's script runs out of creative ideas towards the end. The character of Pinbacker (Mark Strong) owes more to the most banal parts of the slasher genre than to what Boyle had set out to do here, and although he isn't directly destructive for the ending, the introduction of this character keeps the film from reaching the heights it had promised in the final third.